#one day you people will see what i mean when i've defined my characters psyches enough to be like 'ok yeah i feel comfortable enough-

[crescentfool]

every day i have to live with the fact that my subconscious is a blender with yosuke and sylvain in it and that some of my splat ocs had some of that juice and are influenced by those two 💔

[k-s-morgan]

Hi! I've been in the Hannibal fandom for two years now. Rewatched the show many times and yet Will Graham still confuses me like no one else. Hannibal's design is complex but somewhat understandable after watching the show again again. But Will's design is like a loophole. He can empathise with the killers. That means he can understand them. If he can understand them then why does it feel good for him to kill them? How does it work for him exactly. Does he feel for the killers? If he felt for the killers then what about his violent tendencies towards them?

I've always thought that he is like a God. A God of the killers. The killers offer him their design and he takes sacrifice in return of understanding. But how does his psyche work exactly?

Hello! Oh yes, Will is a very confusing character - it’s his defining trait, and I think that’s because he lies to himself, to others, and to us as an audience. He wants one thing, wants to want another thing, does the third thing, and making sense of it is a complex process.

I think Will’s empathy is a big red herring. I agree with Freddie here: he understands killers because he’s one. He has an almost supernatural gift that helps him recreate the situations almost exactly as they happened. He understands what motivates killers, he might sympathize with them, but I think he might also envy them their freedom to be what they are. They are a reminder of what he is and what he can’t allow himself to have. But most importantly, they are a way for Will to find a compromise with himself and feel better about his true self. Killing bad people is an excuse to justify his darkness, but I don’t think it’s a part of his design per se. 

I agree with you that Will is like a God - he and Hannibal both are. That’s one of the things that separates them from others and elevates them above everyone else. Let’s make an overview of Will’s victims.

1) Hobbs. Hobbs was a monster and Will killed him. But it wasn’t about justice and righteousness, not according to him. Killing a person and feeling pleased that you saved someone versus liking the act of killing itself are drastically different things. Many police officers have to kill in their line of duty. Very few of them get off on the act of murder. Those who do are killers, and they are especially dangerous if they immediately try to follow it up with another murder. Will never once says he liked killing Hobbs because he made this world better. When asked, he says that he felt a sense of power. This is a motivation of many actual serial killers. If Will was just glad that he saved Abigail, he would know it's normal. He wouldn't have been almost on the verge of a break-down and haunted by Hobbs. So it’s not about helping others, it's about murder, even if the victim was a monster.

2) Stammets. Will had no reason to try to kill him (which he admits to doing). Based on his and Hannibal’s talk, he understands that he just wanted to feel what he felt after killing Hobbs, and this makes him panic. So again, no someone. He’s chasing the high of killing someone, and Stammets is the most appropriate victim. 

3) Ingram. On the surface, it looks like Will wanted to avenge Peter and himself by proxy, hence pulling the trigger on Ingram. However, after Hannibal manages to stop him, days later, Will complains about losing a chance to feel how he felt when killing Hobbs. Murder high is his main motivation again - everything else is background or an excuse, depending on your reading.    

4) Randall. Will threw away the gun on purpose to make the murder more intimate. This is not about justice and this is not about protecting himself because by doing this, he reduced his chances. Will also beat Randall up until he wasn't moving. There was no reason to snap his neck. Mutilation, cannibalism that followed, keeping his suit, admitting he enjoyed the murder and calling it his design - this is about murder and WIll’s love for it primarily. The design part is especially important: based on it, we can conclude that Will loves a performance just like Hannibal.  

4) Chiyoh and her prisoner who Will set up. Chiyoh was innocent and didn't deserve to die. Her prisoner might not have been guilty - in fact, Will was the one to suggest that, and yet Will still set him up. It was a game and he was an observer - he lied in waiting for Chiyoh’s scream. He then turned the body of a losing party into art. Very creepy and very like Hannibal.

5) Chilton. Will clearly explained his motivation: he wanted Chilton to pay just because he wanted to be famous and messed with Hannibal by writing his ridiculous book. Will showed no remorse and admitted he did it on purpose.

6) Police officers he set up to be killed by cooperating with Francis. The ones he stepped over without a second look. They were innocent and they were a collateral damage. Will is a cruel God who doesn’t bother with mere mortals as long as it fits his purpose. In this case, his purpose was freeing Hannibal. Everything else was still a blur in his mind. 

7) Francis. Enjoyed the murder, admired the blood, called the situation beautiful.

8) Bedelia. She's innocent in comparison to Will and his body count. If Will faced no repercussions and continued getting more and more people killed, she had every right to go free. But God doesn’t have to be fair, and Will proves it by targeting her. 

What does it all say about Will’s design and philosophy? Apart from Godlike attributes and indifference toward collateral damage, I think Will is led by his bloodlust - he just tends to control it and direct it at specific targets. 

Will might prefer to kill “bad people” in the first two seasons, but it’s the process of murder that excites him. So I see his righteous choices as a preference that helps him justify his dark nature partly, not the core reason for his violence. Hannibal seems to be moved by his interest in human nature and his hunter instinct, but Will, I think, is a truer killer because he actually feels drunk on murder. Unlike Hannibal, he looks downright euphoric when/after he kills Randall and Francis. In TWOTL, Hannibal is more focused on the fact that his dream came true and he and Will killed someone together, but Will seems primarily caught up in the murder after-shocks themselves. Hannibal thinks about Will, Will thinks about how beautiful blood looks under the moonlight.

So, post Fall, I believe that at first, Will will stick to killing bad people like murderers, but once some times passes, his need for justifications will fade. He’ll move on to rude people, only his rude will differ from Hannibal’s. Hannibal doesn’t differentiate between genders and ages, but I think Will will. He’s interested in a feeling of power, like he himself says, in a sense of dominance, so he’ll look forward to a fight. He won’t be interested in attacking a teenager like Cassie, for instance, because the power imbalance is too prominent. But as soon as someone more equal does something Will heavily dislikes, something that wakes his bloodlust (a personal insult, physical or verbal abuse toward other people/animals, etc.), he’ll attack. He’ll be careful - he knows how to avoid being caught, but it will still be unpredictable and passionate. Will is a storm to Hannibal’s calm.

Then there is unpredictability. Hannibal tends to plan everything methodically. The only times we see him being impulsive is in Europe, where he’s descending into self-destructive mode, so it’s not a norm for him. For Will, though? Will consists of unpredictability, and Hannibal is fascinated by it.I think Will is going to kill when an impulse strikes. For example, he might go shopping, without having any dark plans, and end up murdering someone because the circumstances pushed some unfortunate soul onto his path. Will might or might not display the body depending on his mood. Today he can be in an artistic mood, but tomorrow he’ll be in a violent and impatient one, wanting to destroy the body entirely and leaving a total mess behind.

How Will would prefer to kill? In my opinion, in an intimate way. It doesn’t mean he’ll be weaponless, but something like a knife would fit his tastes well. He’d be able to feel it plunge into his victim’s body, tearing through skin and muscles, etc. - personal and intimate. Akin to what he did with Francis - his feral half-snarl, the way he paused after stabbing him before opening him up - it was dark and mesmerizing. Will might get into strangling, too, because it takes a lot of time and it is even more intimate. It might end up being his favorite. So, I can see him using his hands or small weapons to fully sense what he’s doing to a victim. This is something that he has in common with Hannibal because from what we saw, Hannibal also enjoys more intimate and prolonged murders that give him a glimpse into a person’s pain and struggle for life.

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

I used to find this weird, but after lo these many years in and around fandom, I finally twigged that shipping wars, or really most fannish disputes, are never about fictional characters. The kind of people who find it easy to get invested in and noisy about fandom stuff have a particular -- gift? talent? weakness? thoroughly value-neutral tendency? -- that allows them to weave their own life stories and recurring issues into stories they read. People angry or defensive or super protective of a character or a relationship between characters -- that's *never* about the story in an objective way. It's always about the person speaking.

And that's okay if you're hip to it and you use it productively, for Art Reasons or to help you gain clarity or feel less alone -- shit, ask me sometime about why I'm at risk of losing my goddamn mind when people say things I don't like about Ronon Dex or Castiel or Quentin Coldwater, three characters defined by their sense of lacking a homeworld, of being stranded where they don't fit and will never belong. I am not a neutral observer here.

The problem is that a lot of people are reactive about this stuff. They ship based on what they feel would meet their deepest needs, or validate the stuff about them they most need validated, and that's fine, unless you don't have the discernment to realize that what a character or plotline or ship means *subjectively to you* is not objective reality. Then suddenly criticism of The Thing that you're all tied up in feels like an *objective,* tangible, hostile unwillingness to see or hear who you are.

And people who feel like they're being intentionally and maliciously denied that kind of validation and acceptance -- well, it's easier to understand how that feeling unlocks some fighting instincts in a lot of people.

It takes emotional calibration and maturity to be fully comfortable going, "Yeah, this has nothing to do with me and I don't need to respond to this." Like, I'm much, much better at it than I used to be, but I've still had to eliminate certain people from my fannish world because I was finding it such a struggle to watch them be OBVIOUSLY WRONG in certain specific ways that I was taking far, far more personally than I should've been. I'm sure they're lovely people, but they were mashing buttons for me that -- like, life is just too short, I needed to move on.

So I get it. And in Ye Elder Days when I was a slip of a fangirl, I sometimes handled that tension in ways I can't recommend. It's hard, I get it. And line-crossing that seems obvious from the outside doesn't necessarily feel obvious when you're defending vulnerable parts of your own psyche.

Still, you practice to get better. You practice setting boundaries for yourself and holding to them -- "no name-calling or death threats even if you're sure they deserve it" is a good one to start with. You practice accepting that other people may not see things like you do no matter how right you are or how well you explain, and that's just a life thing that never goes away. Mostly, I think the core practice is learning to say to yourself, "Self, this reaction feels really strong, given the low stakes involved. What is this signaling me to pay attention to in me?"

But not everyone's there. Some people are just going to feel a thing and get mad and lash out -- particularly when internet fandom is probably a much safer outlet for expressing pent-up aggression than anywhere else in that person's real life. It sucks, people should try harder and be kinder, but we're all where we are in life, you know?

Anyway, tl;dr it's never about the thing, it's always about whatever the person has projected onto the thing. So it's less bizarre behavior than it seems at first glance.